Recently, I have been using Fullstory to view how my visitors behave on my landing page - and boy does it make a huge difference when that visitor comes from Google or Facebook ads.
Regular visitors from an email that I send out, or from a mailing list, reddit, forums, among others - actually read the content on the landing page. You can see the mouse move across the text as they read in some instances. You can see how they scroll, the breaks they take to digest. Though the clip is 3X faster than usual, below you can see how the scrolling and mouse movements make sense. [Ed. note: Clips are on source page.]
This visitor is very different - it feels like its a paid slave somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence, or a person that does not read. The mouse rarely moves, it does scroll - though mostly in one direction, and the pace is as if the visitor is not reading the content. Mobile users just scroll and scroll until the bottom and then they leave.
As a result I have stopped all my Google and Facebook campaigns and have focused on growing the service more organically via social sharing and friends. Has anyone else experienced this as well? I'd be happy to share videos or more details, but the difference is clearly noticeable. I'd be interested to see if Fullstory has any high-level analysis of this or if they can verify this behavior.
[...] I am not sure if this is true, but does anyone else experience very, very, very, different click-through and conversion rates on Google and Facebook relative to other organic means?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:18AM
Take it one step further, and blame yourself.
Wall street wants high returns, not only because they are greedy, but because their customers have to get great returns to be able to afford to retire. Investment funds need to keep cranking the highest possible returns to avoid being abandoned by you and me... How far do people look into the past when choosing their 401k funds?
Yup, in a wonderful twist of US greedy irony, the job sucks and you'll be outsourced, partially because you are trying to afford your retirement without a pension.
LOL, as they say.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:27AM
Whenever I make a similar argument as to why the news industry has faltered, in the US at least, that being because of "You" not wanting to pay for newspapers and insist on running ad blockers and there's no money to actually pay someone to do investigative journalism, I get modded to hell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @08:52AM
Right, I'll just stop running ad blockers and get infested with malware, be tracked, and have pages slow to a crawl; that seems sensible. There's a reason why people block ads, and it's not because ads are typically reasonable and unobtrusive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @12:22AM
Not sure I agree...I don't run blockers on most of my boxes, and I never disable JavaScript.
Can't recall getting malware. Probably depends on where you surf.
That being said, I do think it is creepy when I see ads for stuff I googled four weeks ago.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 19 2017, @06:12PM
If ad networks didn't insist on tracking my browsing behavior from one site to another, running proprietary JavaScript programs on my computer, or running video ads on non-video articles, then I wouldn't feel a need to use a tracking blocker.